My invention relates to roller gins.
In the art to which my invention relates it is well known that the efficiency of roller gins depends, in large measure, on removing the build-up of foreign matter on or adjacent the cutting edge of the knife which cooperates with the roll, the knife and roll forming the mechanism which removes lint from the seed cotton as it is fed to the apparatus. Attempts have been made to clean knives by intermittently blowing the trash from the knife cutting edge with blasts of air or the like. The assignee of this application owns U.S. Pat. No. 4,262,390 dated April 21, 1981, "ROLLER GIN AND FEED SYSTEM INCORPORATING THE SAME" which shows air cleaning of the knife. While the apparatus shown in the above patent is satisfactory, my present invention is an improvement over that apparatus and so far as I am aware, over all previous apparatus and processes for cleaning roller gin knives.
Briefly, my invention incorporates associating with the usual and customary parts of a roller gin means automatically to clean the knife, either intermittently or at predetermined, set intervals of time, by first stopping the feed to the gin and then releasing the pressure between the knife and roller, following which the roller is reversed for a few revolutions, thus causing trash such as cotton, leaf particles, etc. draped over the knife to be removed therefrom. While as will be explained hereinafter, there are other details to my improved process of operating roller gins with regard to the motion between the roller and knife for cleaning purposes, nevertheless the general concept of my invention is just as stated, namely, to reverse the direction of rotation of the roll thus to remove trash from the cutting edge of the knife.